


Ash Tyler, Voq, and Star Trek All Grown Up

by TomFooleryPrime



Series: Musings and Analysis of the Star Trek Fandom [8]
Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Ash Tyler/Voq - Freeform, Dubious Ethics, Essays, Ethics, Gen, Meta, Moral Dilemmas, Multiple Personalities, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Philosophy, Sharing a Body, Spoilers, Vaulting Ambition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-23
Updated: 2018-01-23
Packaged: 2019-03-08 11:01:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13456842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TomFooleryPrime/pseuds/TomFooleryPrime
Summary: The idea of two characters sharing a body isn't a new concept for Trek, but the way it's being handled most certainly is. Some food for thought about the problem of Voq and Ash Tyler existing as a single person.Sometimes I ramble ontumblr. Someone recommended posting some of my essays here.





	Ash Tyler, Voq, and Star Trek All Grown Up

We learned a lot more about the curious case of Lieutenant Ash Tyler/Voq in the _Star Trek: Discovery_ episode, “Vaulting Ambition.” It was finally confirmed in the previous week that the character we know as Ash Tyler is harboring some Klingon memories, but the precise mechanism behind how that happened was still a mystery, until Saru finally brought up the thing we were all wondering about:

Which prompted L’Rell to spill the beans.

> “ _The one you call Tyler was captured in battle at the Binary Stars. We harvested his DNA, reconstructed his consciousness, and rebuilt his memory. We modified Voq into a shell that appears human. We grafted his psyche into Tyler’s, and in so doing, Voq has given his body and soul for our ideology_.”
> 
> —L’Rell

It’s not all that shocking. Months of fan speculation aside, it’s not like this is a new trope for this franchise.

> _Remember this guy?_

What L’Rell revealed last night opens up an opportunity for _Star Trek: Discovery_ to venture into classic _Trek_ territory in a very un- _Trek_ way. How the hell are we supposed to figure out what to _think_ about Ash Tyler’s situation? 

The _Trek_ formula of old would have given us a tidy episode in a box where the captain was confronted with some dilemma and spent the majority of the fifty-two minutes of air time chewing on it in such a way that the audience wasn’t really required to ponder the ramifications because we had a Picard or a Janeway to serve as the wise parental figure and do the messy business of thinking for us.

Yet _Discovery_ lacks that central guiding ethical compass: its main character isn’t a captain, she’s a convict. That arguably makes Michael Burnham the most dynamic lead _Star Trek_ has ever put forward, but because she’s too busy finding her place on a ship in the midst of a war with the Klingons and crawling over heaps of inner turmoil, that doesn’t leave her a lot of free time to tell us how to approach the wider problems presented in each episode. She tries to speak up as the voice of reason (miss you, Ripper!), but thus far, her objections are often drowned out by a plot that’s constantly blazing forward at Warp 10. It makes for good storytelling and character development, but it leaves the analysis of complex issues to the audience.

Think about it—every incarnation of _Star Trek_ up until now had a way of introducing us to problems that were so obviously an allusion to the issues of their respective decades, whether it was Kirk meeting a society of people who desperately needed birth control or Archer ending up in a Suliban detainee camp courtesy of President George Bush… er, whoever the Tandaran leader was during the 2150s.

Captain Picard was the ultimate master of holding viewers’ hands all the way through the first four acts of an episode, carefully spoon feeding us both sides of an issue before finally allowing us to absorb the full weight of an enormous moral, ethical, or philosophical question in the final act with an impassioned speech or contemplative captain’s log entry. We were allowed to be mentally lazy. 

> _Is Data a person? Who’s to say? Let’s literally hold a trial to weigh the evidence!_

The issues surrounding Ash Tyler are so enormously complex and raise questions about the nature of consciousness, self, immortality, and bodily autonomy, as well as the role of crime and punishment in society. It seems pretty ambiguous whether or not the real Ash Tyler is still alive in a Klingon prison somewhere, but regardless, maybe we should start by exploring whether we can really call the person lying in _Discovery_ ’s sickbay Ash Tyler. 

If someone were to duplicate your consciousness and place it into another living being, how would you define that individual? Say hypothetically that you are still alive, so is the other being with your consciousness now _also_ you, an extension of you, or a completely independent being that simply carries your memories? If the original version of you is destroyed, did you really die, if a carbon copy of your mind exists somewhere else? If such a procedure is possible, doesn’t that imply we could theoretically live forever through a series of host bodies?

> _I feel like this is the premise of one-third of all Black Mirror episodes._

Hopefully, next week’s episode will iron out some of the details behind how the procedure was performed and whether or not L’Rell successfully removed Voq’s consciousness from Tyler’s physical form, but that just raises more questions. 

L’Rell indicated that the albino Klingon we knew as Voq in the first three episodes gave up his physical form to _look_ like Ash Tyler, so the body was originally Voq’s.

> _Alien talent for crafting human flesh bags into suits varies by franchise._

So if L’Rell manages to remove Voq’s consciousness from the body he and Tyler share, is that the equivalent of killing Voq? Conversely, if she snuffs out any trace of Tyler, has she killed Tyler? Last night’s episode made it apparent that if someone didn’t do something soon, the guy in sickbay screaming Klingon curses one minute and weeping human tears the next was going to die, but is it ethical to take one life to save another, and how do we decide?

I think the natural instinct is to say that obviously Voq needs to go in favor of Tyler. It’s easy to justify too: Voq knew what he was risking, the Klingons and Federation _are_ in the midst of a war, and it doesn’t really seem like Tyler had much say in the medical experimentation performed on him. Not to mention, it kind of seemed like it was Voq shining through when Hugh Culber was killed. The Voq side of this person is clearly violent, dangerous, and a self-proclaimed enemy of the Federation.

Now consider how you feel about the death penalty. If you ardently support it, I question why you watch a show featuring people from an idealistic utopia where the death penalty was abolished, but hey, I’m sure the issue of what to do about Voq must seem pretty cut and dry. If you oppose the death penalty for any reason, now is probably a good time to ask yourself exactly _why_ that is and apply it to this very bizarre situation.

Before you start hurling digital rotten produce at me for daring to suggest that Voq be given rights over Tyler, I’m not advocating that, I’m merely asking you to consider it, because while the DNA is Tyler’s, the _body_ is Voq’s. The heart of so many modern issues rest on a similar platform, this idea that we have the right to decide the fate of our own bodies, no matter what else we’ve done. 

It’s why we don’t harvest organs from criminals or force them to submit to dangerous medical experimentation, even though some *cough*Nazis*cough* might argue in favor of crude social arithmetic that there’s some net “good” to be had by testing unproven HIV vaccines or pioneering brain surgery on our convict population. To be fair, Voq _decided_ to become Ash Tyler, and in doing so, it seems so _un_ fair that I should even be considering his rights when it certainly seems like Tyler’s rights were so brutally and traumatically stripped away from him.

But _Star Trek_ has also never shied away from unfair predicaments. Remember that time Trip Tucker was in a coma and Phlox collected his DNA and injected it into a Lyssarian Desert larvae to grow a Tucker clone, which they later named Sim, just so they could harvest Sim’s neural tissue for a transplant? OG Tucker was unconscious and didn’t consent to the procedure, and while Tucker 2.0 also didn’t ask to get made, which one deserved to live?

> _Yeah Sim, he owed you so big._

No matter what happens, the whole business with Voq and Tyler is a bloody damn mess and there’s no chance for real justice for anyone involved. By stuffing Ash Tyler’s consciousness into Voq’s body and then mutilating Voq to look like Ash Tyler, L’Rell created an individual who is arguably somehow _both_ Voq and Tyler and also _neither_ Voq and Tyler at the same time.

 _Star Trek_ built an entire species based around this premise in the form of the Trills. For seven seasons of _Star Trek: Deep Space Nine_ , the symbiont Dax put us through our paces as we teased apart Jadzia from Dax and all of her previous hosts. There are too many episodes featuring Jadzia conflicting with the memories of her predecessors to count, but it was always interesting, watching Jadzia stand trial for something Curzon allegedly did, and it was heartbreaking watching her husband Worf interact with Ezri, Dax’s next host, after Jadzia’s untimely death. However much fans wished Ezri would love Worf as much as Jadzia had, Ezri _wasn’t_ Jadzia and she deserved the freedom to make her own decisions.

So, I have to come back to the question, is Ash Tyler even really Ash Tyler? Can a copy be as good as the original? In many cases, _sure_. If someone torched the Declaration of Independence, its meaning isn’t lost forever; we have countless copies in textbooks and Internet archives. Ideas and facts are obviously more important than the paper that they’re printed on, but aren’t people greater than just the sum of their thoughts and experiences?

 _Star Trek: The Next Generation_ asked that question once when a transporter accident spawned a clone of William Riker, only he wasn’t _technically_ a clone, because he shared all of Riker’s memories leading up to the accident. A clone implies an individual whose genome was copied from another individual, but the person created in that transporter glitch was an _exact copy_.

 

> _You know Riker II is looking at Riker I and thinking, “I grew a beard because I didn’t have a razor. Don’t tell me you grew that shit on purpose?”_

Are they really _exactly_ the same though? Once their paths began to diverge with differing life experiences (one got stranded on a station while the other went on to have a successful career in Starfleet), they really became two separate individuals, more like twins than the exact same person. So, I would argue that whether or not the original Tyler is really alive out there, the Tyler we know isn’t _really_ Ash Tyler. 

But whoever he is and however he was created, he has rights too. He’s the only innocent person in this whole shitty scenario, and even if Voq’s consciousness is removed, no doubt the experience will irrevocably alter Tyler.

But what if L’Rell can’t separate them? I think of all the options, a plot twist that forces Tyler and Voq to coexist in the same body is easily the most complicated and daring path forward. Tuvok and Neelix had polar opposite personalities, but at least when _they_ got spliced together, they generally lived by the same moral code. All the incarnations of Dax were also wildly different, but they jived well (so long as you forget that whole uncomfortable Joran incident).

Voq and Tyler are essentially Jekyll and Hyde. Voq killed Hugh Culber and attempted to kill Michael Burnham, so should he (they) be punished for those crimes? _American Horror Story: Freak Show_ tried to address a similar situation when one conjoined twin murdered her mother in a moment of rage. It forces us to ask which is worse, “Deliberately punishing an innocent person or allowing a guilty one to go free?”

I have no idea what will happen in future episodes, but the idea of Voq and Tyler having to learn to live together might actually provide this show with something it’s been largely lacking thus far: a character who has to learn what it means to be human and who can provide an outsider’s commentary and insight on our odd little species, much like Spock, Data, The Doctor, Seven of Nine, and T’Pol did. Given Michael Burnham’s upbringing and life sentence for mutiny, it seemed like she was well-poised to fit this role, but while she spent the latter part of her formative years on Vulcan and is a lot less emotional than most of her crewmates, she’s fairly clued in to the human condition. 

> _Not so great at beer pong, but still a competent human._

Ultimately, I can’t wait to see how the Ash Tyler’s situation gets resolved, but I can now safely say _Discovery_ might be my favorite series in the franchise. Some people hate it because it’s a lot of explosions and fighting and thus far, it hasn’t really felt like _Star Trek_ with a power-hungry captain, Klingons with heavy prosthetics, and exceptional CGI. 

No, it ain’t your momma’s _Star Trek_ , but maybe that’s a good thing. I grew up watching _The Next Generation_ and later watched _Deep Space Nine_ , _Voyager_ , and _Enterprise_ , and it was nice having Picard, Sisko, Janeway, and Archer gently guide me to the answers with calm, well-reasoned thinking. In a lot of ways, they taught me how to think about morally complex matters, and now that I’m older, I’m able to think for myself while I watch _Discovery_ , and that is precisely why I love it so much. 

 _Discovery_ is _Star Trek_ all grown up.  


End file.
